Aaron Copland and his World. Ed. by Carol J. Oja and Judith Tick. pp. xxiv + 503. (Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2005, 35.95. ISBN 0-691-12469-8.)

Abstract

As Carol J. Oja and Judith Tick suggest in their joint introduction to this volume—the latest in an annual series published in conjunction with the Bard Music Festival—there has been a minor explosion in Copland studies over the last decade. Indeed, given Copland’s pre-eminence among American composers of the twentieth century, it is surprising how little had been written about him prior to the appearance in the 1980s of the two volumes of quasi-autobiography, co-written with Vivian Perlis (Boston, 1984; New York, 1989), and The Music of Aaron Copland by Neil Butterworth (London, 1985). Since the late 1990s, however—no doubt due in part to the easy availability of primary sources through the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project—we have been treated to a steady stream of articles in such journals as American Music and JAMS, as well as Howard Pollack’s comprehensive Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York and London, 1999), Judith Tick and Gail Levin’s Aaron Copland’s America: A Cultural Perspective (New York, 2000), Elizabeth B. Crist’s Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War (New York, 2005), and Peter Dickinson’s edited collection of Copland Connotations: Studies and Interviews (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2002). The volume under review attempts to complement these other publications in offering a substantial sequence of self-contained contributions—some biographical, some cultural, others analytical—that aim to help readers in making some overall sense of ‘Aaron Copland and his world’. However, given the sheer volume of scholarship that has emerged of late, there was the nagging suspicion, even before opening this book, that it might contain not the choicest handpicked fruit but, rather, the late season windfalls.